After graduating from art academies in the Dutch cities of Tilburg and Breda (Fontys and St Joost, respectively), Marjan Teeuwen painted for 12 years before changing direction. ‘I’m not painter,’ she says. ‘I’m a builder.’ A series of one-room installations (2000 to 2005) followed, and in 2008 (surely not coincidentally at the outbreak of the financial crisis) she embarked on a sequence called Verwoest Huizen (English title: Destroyed Houses). With these, she reworks derelict buildings into temporary ruined monuments, removing floors, walls and ceilings and filling them with the stacked detritus of the lives formerly lived there. The series culminated in her treatment of 14 council flats in Amsterdam-North (2014); painstakingly dismantled, they seem to commemorate the demise of the Dutch welfare state. Teeuwen lives in Den Bosch.
MARJAN TEEUWEN'S INSTALLATIONS TRANSFORM CONDEMNED BUILDINGS
Jane Szita, Frame Web, August 15, 2015
